Dark Drawn

The exhibition Dark Drawn will be opened on 4th of May, 6 pm at the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Consolation, Savičiaus St. 15, Vilnius.

Dark Drawn aims at being a powerful statement through the medium of drawing. Through recent decades drawing has fortified its position as a challenging opponent to other media, capable of astounding audiences with untraditional and unexpected manoeuvres. In order to present this to a wider audience, we have attempted to compile a drawing exhibition that combines traditions with contemporaneity. These art works show drawing as neither an academic exercise nor a sketch, but as a complete and definitive artistic statement.

In this exhibition, we are introducing six artists from different countries: Australia, Great Britain/Norway, Lithuania, Holland, and Sweden. It presents artists who are loosely connected through their approach to drawing and observation. The works in Dark Drawn are diverse both in their goal and method. However, what characterises Dark Drawn is a connection through a sensuality achieved from the elusive medium of drawing, the spare intimacy of the technique itself, coupled to drawing’s immediacy when reinterpreting the observed.

All around us, we find drawing performing vital roles in our everyday life. Christian Rattemeyer wrote in Vitamin D2 New Perspectives in Drawing (Phaidon, 2013): ‘… we afford drawing a place in the continuum of activities that go almost unnoticed from telephone scribbles… to the ubiquitous children’s drawings…’ This activity extends itself from graffiti to architectural diagrams etc. Yet, fulfilling drawing’s true potential within the realm of contemporary visual art has been a relatively recent achievement. Historically, masterworks or iconic works in drawing have been rare in comparison to painting.

Dark Drawn is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s iconic novel Heart of Darkness (1899; in 1979 Francis Ford Coppola adapted its story for his film Apocalypse Now). Here, surrounding nature that destabilises Marlow’s contact Kurtz, acts as a metaphor for darkness, the potential for melancholia and madness, latent in each of us, ready to reveal itself when circumstance forces itself upon us. Thus, the concept of darkness in the Dark Drawn exhibition relates to a metaphoric and transformative dimension, where the observed world acts as a trigger for artworks to be drawn out from the observer herself rather than as a source for resemblance.

This exhibition will be supervised by our guides, who will gladly present the works and the church in which the latter are exhibited.

The exhibition will be open for visitors throughout 5th of May – 10th of June* on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 2 pm to 8 pm.
*The exhibition will be closed on May 13th and throughout May 18th–20th.

The exhibition is organized by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts
Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Lithuania, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Nordic Culture Point, and Mondriaan Fund